History of the American Automobile Industry

David Beecroft was editor of the magazine The Automobile in the years before World War I and was later president of the Society of Automotive Engineers. Between October 1915 and August 1916 he wrote a history of the automobile industry and published it in his magazine in serial form. The result is a fascinating and authoritative essay that validates stories we have heard from other sources and brings out others that are now little known, especially in the areas of the development of the gasoline engine and the pneumatic tire. Beecroft's work is now fragmented across more than forty issues of a hard-to-find publication so it is infrequently seen and little used. We, however, were able to gain access to the entire series and are pleased to reprint it, making it easily available to the automotive community. A few typos in the original have been corrected, but the work otherwise remains exactly as Beecroft published it including his numerous original illustrations.